Investigate migrating or replacing blog aggregator

[dlglin]

1. The only data for this that I can find is simply a list of the blogs being aggregated (which is just one file).

2. Since planet is not supported anymore and even pluto seemed not that active to me I was looking at: perlplanet by Dave Cross (I met him at the Perl conference last summer) — which I thought might work as a dropin replacement

   • perl planet
   • https://perlanet.mag-sol.com/ (dave cross)
   • https://metacpan.org/pod/perlanet
   • https://metacpan.org/pod/Plagger another one was planetEX — which seemed more complicated to me https://www.sep.com/sep-blog/2018/10/01/announcing-planetex-an-open-source-blog-aggregator-written-in-elixir/

3. Does anyone else have other ideas? This transfer seems fairly easy, but it’s also not as urgent since there is a very small amount of data that has to be preserved.

[taniwallach]

See also: https://github.com/openwebwork/docs/issues/12

[taniwallach]

From research done earlier, another possible relevant option seems to be: Pluto.

• https://github.com/feedreader
• It seems to be actively maintained. (Active commit activity in https://github.com/feedreader/pluto/commits/master) but seems to be a one man project.
• It seems that https://planet.opensuse.org/ is currentlt running using Pluto. Their GitHub repo at https://github.com/openSUSE/planet-o-o has the first commit from 31 Dec 2019, but the site dates back to at least 2010. Maybe someone at admin@opensuse.org would be willing to share information on how/why they decided on Pluto. A key player (who made all the commits to https://github.com/openSUSE/planet-o-o) is Stasiek Michalski.
• https://github.com/feedreader
• https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wwwmake/kZvwR1kEewo
• http://feedreader.github.io/jekyll.planet.sample/
• https://github.com/geraldb/talks/blob/master/planet.md
• http://feedreader.github.io/
• https://github.com/feedreader/pluto
• https://github.com/feedreader/pluto.starter

Given that it should not be hard to try out both Pluto and perlanet, I think one of us can try to install and configure them on a local machine, and based on the experience - decide which to try using on the new server.

---

Systems to rule out - no longer maintained:

1. planet-venus
   • Debian is dropping it, as it is not being maintained
   • https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/planet-venus
   • https://github.com/rubys/venus
2. https://github.com/moonmoon/moonmoon is also not active.

[taniwallach]

• https://metacpan.org/pod/Plagger

Does not seem to be maintained, and is apparently far more complex and capable.

another one was planetEX — which seemed more complicated to me
https://www.sep.com/sep-blog/2018/10/01/announcing-planetex-an-open-source-blog-aggregator-written-in-elixir/

I ran into that also when I looked at options, and it seems to have several dependencies which we a less likely to have other need for. See the readme at https://github.com/sep/planet_ex .

1. Does anyone else have other ideas? This transfer seems fairly easy, but it’s also not as urgent since there is a very small amount of data that has to be preserved.

As I understand it - all we really need to preserve is the list of feeds.

[taniwallach]

From research done earlier, another possible relevant option seems to be: Pluto.

I tried out Pluto, and ran into an issue, made a report on GitHub (https://github.com/feedreader/pluto.starter/issues/1) and the project author's mailing list (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/wwwmake/ZYBID6_wEAY/WIbSVVzGFQAJ) and received a response with an explanation and a temporary workaround in less than a day.

Installing/testing Pluto on Debian (Ubuntu should be very similar) using the procedure from https://github.com/feedreader/pluto.starter + pre-installing prerequisites. The user installing it will need sudo access so things can be installed in system locations.

sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends --no-install-suggests git ruby-bundler sqlite3 sudo gcc make libsqlite3-dev ruby-dev
mkdir WORKDIR
cd WORKDIR
git clone https://github.com/feedreader/pluto.starter.git
cd pluto.starter
bundle install
# Need to give it password for "sudo" to allow system installation of Gems

# Workaround issue in current release template
vim planet-starter/planet.starter.html.erb
# Replace all instances of `item.published` with `item.updated`.
# Save

bundle exec pluto build planet.ini -t starter -o build

The sample output is in build/planet.starter.html.

It seems to have a very general template system, so the design should be pretty easy to customize.

I think it should be very easy to use this option, but maybe someone should also test https://metacpan.org/pod/perlanet.